5 Ingredient Granola Bars

18 June 2017

These No-Bake 5 Ingredient Granola Bars are just the thing to make for a snack on the go.

When it comes to snack time for the children, I frequently reach for easy options like cut up fruit, yoghurt, or maybe rice crackers spread with butter and Vegemite. If we have friends visiting during morning or afternoon tea, I love to make a batch of pikelets which are always a hit with the children.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with homemade granola bars, primarily because I have a big bag of rolled oats which needs using up. And when I stumbled across some ideas for a no-bake granola bar, I knew I was onto something good.

As you may have gathered from the title, these granola bars contain only 5 ingredients. And what’s more, you don’t even have to bake them!

With summer in full-swing in Zurich, the children have been begging to go to the lake most days. You might not know this about Zurich, but summertime here is almost like living along the French Riviera; everyone gravitates towards the lake where you can set up your picnic blanket on the grass, build sandcastles along the shoreline, and swim in the crystal clear waters.

At designated areas along the lake, you can even find splash pools for little children, common barbecue areas like in Australia, and a variety of grill stands and ice-cream carts.

So when the weather is warm and sunny, you can probably understand why I might not be in the kitchen that day!

So it makes sense to opt for recipes which require minimal time in the kitchen, and these 5 Ingredient Granola Bars fit the bill perfectly. It takes next to no time to mix the ingredients together, and they take just a few hours to set in the fridge.

These granola bars started out life plain, which worked really well as an afternoon snack for the children with some dried fruit on the side. Naturally, the evolution of these granola bars went on to include dried fruit in the mixture and, recently, I thought I would add chocolate chips to make them more of a treat.

As you can see, you can use this recipe as a blueprint and play around with the ingredients to suit your tastes, or just to make things a bit different now and then. What I particularly love about this recipe is the use of coconut oil; it gives the bars the delicious taste of coconut, although there is no coconut added. My local supermarket sells jars of coconut oil alongside the usual oils and vinegars, but health food shops will also stock coconut oil, although note that recent studies suggest that coconut oil is not as healthy as suggested by many in the social media. My view is to consume everything in moderation for a healthy diet 🙂

Right now, I take much comfort in knowing that there is a tray of these 5 Ingredient Granola Bars in the fridge, which means that snack time over the next few days is taken care of.